[Ads-l] Crooked number

[Jonathan Lighter]

1994 _Augusta [Ga.] Chronicle_ (May 13) C-1: The GreenJackets finally got
around to putting up a crooked number - and it was mighty crooked. In
baseballese, "crooked numbers" are innings with multiple runs instead of
ones or zeroes.

On Mon, Jun 28, 2021 at 2:07 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> Around for a while, but I don’t know how long a while either.  Often in
> the form “put up a crooked number”, with “on the (score)board” understood.
> Presumably 8 counts a crooked even though 0 doesn’t.
>
> LH
>
>
> > On Jun 28, 2021, at 8:14 AM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
> >
> > I'm sure this predates me by several decades but I'm increasingly
> noticing
> > "crooked number" in baseball slang. In particular, the full expression is
> > "put a crooked number on the board", but abbreviated versions exist as
> > well. Here, the crooked number is 4.
> >
> > https://nypost.com/2021/06/27/yankees-gerrit-cole-ambushed-by-red-sox/
> > That crooked number was hard for us to overcome.
> >
> >
> > VS-)
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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